by Paul Glennon
Furtive Fallacy
When she looked over and quite innocently, I now concede, smiled, I believed I saw a glint of understanding. She had divined the injuries my soul had endured and was ready with all manner of salves and cures to soothe them. I was, of course, mistaken.
Moralistic Fallacy
God, it seemed, intended to show me the vanity that formerly drove and presently derided me.
Aesthetic Fallacy
It is quite possible that she could not reveal herself to me, that somewhere in the next room was a man, a not ignoble man, but one who had done her some great favor: carried her away from a cruel aristocratic family home, and to whom she now found herself interminably in debt. In such circumstances I was forced to respect her patrician sense of obligation.
Quantitative Fallacy
She had naturally read the article I wrote for the Venerable Review, and was somewhat abashed in my presence.
Antinomian Fallacy
Several similar incidents that occurred earlier in the evening at the same gathering but in less crowded rooms, (with a girl named Judy and another with an ambitious hemline) incidents in which words had actually been exchanged, had nothing whatsoever to do with this occurrence.
Fortuitous Fallacy
My name was not called from the kitchen; my shoes were quite shiny; my elbow itched; my ostentatious Lowenbrau was one third drained; and I had been to the bathroom eleven minutes earlier. I had turned at one point to examine some South American artifact in the corner cabinet which suddenly seemed quite fascinating. No conclusion could be drawn.
Generalizations
Fallacy of Statistical Sampling
I remembered, not suddenly, but with growing comprehension, my Grade Eight year, and the girl who was too sick to go to the movies for five consecutive weekends.
Women have never found me attractive.
Fallacy of the Lonely Fact
Her watch was a Cartier; I consoled myself with a critique of her superficiality.
Fallacy of Statistical Special Pleading
She could not have noticed the small slip the stairs made upon me as I arrived, my mismatched socks or the silly comment I made about Proust, but she purposely ignored the infinitely wittier comment comparing lawn bowling and Central American politics.
Fallacy of Statistical Impressionism
I had been standing at that side of the doorway for eleven minutes (since my return from the bathroom). I was facing the clock. She was 1.2 metres to the left of the clock at a 20 degree angle from me. She had been standing there four and a half minutes when I caught her eye. It was an accident.
Ecological Fallacy
Amalgams are a class of alloys in which one of the combining metals is mercury. Though mercury readily unites with gold and silver, it does not combine with iron, and for this reason is used to separate gold and silver from other ores. Quicksilver, however, was distinctly absent from the room. It was impossible for me to speak, communicate or amalgamate. We two remained apart from each other and attached to the crowd.
Fallacy of Statistical Nonsense
I am and was twenty-four, a multiplication number signifying fruition. Its multiples are 8, the number of homecoming, and 3, the number of divine union. To this excellent omen, which I had been savouring for months, was added another realization. Only one object stood in the line of vision between us two. It was a vase of wilting foxglove, and the distances between we three points formed the golden section, as described by Pythagoras.
Unfortunately, almost immediately after I perceived this propitious co-ordination, it collapsed. She took two steps to the right.
Fallacy of statistical probability
The rebuke, once received would not prick as sharply as one might think. My skin had been thickened by numerous similar incidents in the past.
Fallacies Of Narration
Fallacy of Archetypes
I am and always have been the Observer. This role makes action impossible. I could not, if I had wanted to, have spoken to her. My role, indeed my mode, is passive. I am obliged to simply watch and record, until I become the watching and the recording. Let me demonstrate -
Interminable Fallacy
Last summer I conceived of a novel that would retell biblical history in reverse chronological order. The obtuse narrator would attempt to prove that The Fall was an inevitable result of Adam and Eve's failure to pass through any of the Freudian phases of development. History thus conceived is the process of inventing things to become fixated on.
I spent June and July working out the details of this work, but by the beginning of August I had failed to write a word. At the end of that month I did manage to write a potential review of the work, where I blasted myself for slavish, uncritical acceptance of Osbergian narrative conventions. I was confused and stung by this review, since I was not previously aware of this tendency in myself. But it was not this overly harsh criticism that brought the novel to a preemptive halt. It was the embarrassment of the comparison to Osberg, and the vanity it revealed in me.
Telescopic Fallacy
Also, my fiance had left me three months previously.
Fallacy of Presentism
I must have known somewhere down deep in my subconscious that she would reject me, orchestrated my entire evening, my entire life to make it easier for her to do so. Why else would I have failed to acquire a tan or an ounce of muscle. Why I else would I be exactly as I am, if not to have her reject me?
have remained trapped in the same situation,
the same science experiment. My position and the position of the woman is fixed. No movement is possible within this scheme. I cannot move towards her. She will not move towards me. A charge builds up and at the moment of its peak I say something stupid transmit my imbecility like an errant electron. And I cannot ignore her subsequent negative charge.
Fallacies of Causation
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
We exchanged that fleeting, damning glance; I coughed, and she left the room.
Fallacy of Absolute Priority
Being the polite girl that she was, courteous and uneager to offend, she would insist that her name had been called from another room, that a phone call needed to be made, that her glass begged to be refilled, or that her legs were tired and a vacancy on the sofa had just opened up.
None of this diminishes the fact that she found my leering odious and immature.
Fallacies of Motivation
Pathetic Fallacy
Foxglove in the language of flowers represent insincerity. They wilted knowingly and ironically. Their offense was noted and evoked the appropriate wince.
Apathetic Fallacy
She could not have helped it, nor did she will it. It was in her nature as a woman, to dislike me. She was revolted as women are supposed to be by insects and unmanly men.
Fallacy of the One Dimensional Man
It is the nature of man to mythologize. All actions become rituals; all men, if time does not obliterate them, survive as gods. The builders of Easter Island's elongated statues were normal people once, but time has made them demigods - the Long Ears who could make stones walk.
A celebrated Norwegian archeologist attempted to reverse this innate mythological process. He turned the island's myths into fact. He built statues in the manner that the mythic Long Ears had proscribed, and with the help of a German engineer, showed how the statues walked - erect, bound with ropes and hauled by 25 thick men.
Myth, however, would not be undone. On his return to the island, the Norwegian (whose given name was Thor and who should have known better) was greeted by worshipers. He too had become a god: the god who awakened statues and forced them to walk again.
I am devoured by a myth of immobility and awkward observation. Daily I become more like those pitted stone statues staring into a vacancy that cannot be offended.
Historians' Fallacy
Speaking in historical types, she played Churchill, where others had played Baldwin or Chamberlain. Defeated countries often employ the harsh judgments against them and the consequent guilt of their conquerors in order to turn defeat into eventual victory. I had undergone my share of Versailles, paid reparations, and played upon not a few women's guilt to win back Lebensraum.
But this clear sighted and decisive woman foresaw it all and refused to be had.
Fallacy of the Universal Man
"Sinon under the divine protection of an unjust destiny stealthily removed the horse's pinewood bars and released the Greeks from their confinement."
The world has grown wise to the Trojan Horse ruse. Those who read tales of self abasement and profuse apologetics no longer presume the author penitent. Nor are women moved from their high battlements by pity and the sense of easy victory.
The divine protection of an unjust destiny persists regardless.
Furtive Fallacy Revisited
Nevertheless, she might have loved me.